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Infor Grid on CryptDB

I made a proof of concept of the Infor ION Grid running on CryptDB, a database that computes on encrypted data.

Fully homomorphic encryption

Let’s suppose Alice is a client that is computationally bounded, she has an input X, she wants to compute an arbitrary program P on her input X and get the result where P is computationally intensive, she wants to delegate her computation to a powerful server (e.g. cloud provider) while preserving the privacy of her input (untrusted cloud). The way to do this is to encrypt the input, do the computation on the cipher text, and output the encryption of the result. A fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is an encryption scheme that achieves that. It is currently still impractical in its full form because the algorithms take exponential time, but it is generating a lot of research in both academia and the industry, and they are bringing variants that make it practical.

CryptDB

CryptDB is a practical database server that allows SQL queries on encrypted data using SQL-aware encryption schemes (e.g. deterministic encryption for joins, order-preserving encryption for comparison predicates, homomorphic encryption for sums). The threat model for CryptDB is to ensure the privacy of the data in the face of a compromise of the database server.

Proof of concept

I made a proof of concept of the Grid running on CryptDB. I have not followed the guidelines to optimize the encryption schemes for the Grid; I just used the default CryptDB with the goal to spark interest in homomorphic encryption. The ideal would be to apply homomorphic encryption to M3.

4. Start the Grid

Result

The result is a Grid running transparently on CryptDB, unaware that the underlying data is encrypted, while CryptDB does the computation on the encrypted data on behalf of the Grid:

The CryptDB proxy intercepts the queries (QUERY), it parses them and encrypts them (NEW QUERY), it executes them on MySQL, it decrypts the result and returns the clear text to the Grid:

Benefits

The advantages are that the Grid data is encrypted which preserves its privacy in case the database server is compromised, and the Grid application did not have to be rewritten for it.

If someone were to compromise the database server, they would only see encrypted table names and columns and encrypted data that does not reveal information about the actual data:

Potential

I hope this proof of concept inspires Infor Product Development to consider this type of security for their applications that run on the multi-tenant cloud, such as M3. Secure multi-party computation and homomorphic encryption are the future direction for the security of multi-tenant clouds and a potential market not yet realized.

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NOTE: The intention of CryptDB is that it is deployed on the client side, not on the database side. In my case, I have both on the same host which defeats CryptDB’s purpose, but it serves for illustration purposes.